Google Is Blind
The NYT makes the e-commerce case for website accessibility:
Most online stores go to great lengths to make sure that their sites are accessible to people with disabilities, simply because it is good business to allow as many people as possible to shop. And online-shopping technology specialists say it is not so difficult or costly a task.
“It’s very straightforward to make a site accessible,” said Dayna Bateman, senior information architect at Fry Inc., which operates e-commerce Web sites on behalf of large retailers including Brookstone, Eddie Bauer and Spiegel.
Ms. Bateman said that the more software coding a Web site could offer to help screen readers and other technologies navigate a site, the more likely it was that the Web site would show up on search engine results, because Google, Yahoo and others looked to the same coding for clues about the Web page’s content.
“So it’s actually an advantage in the marketplace,” she said. “I just don’t think a lot of folks are schooled enough in accessibility to know that.”
Google, I heard someone say once, is the most important user who is blind in the world. The “robots” who index pages for the Google search tool are computer programs that can’t see images. If you don’t make your site work for those robots, the information on your site won’t be indexed. Accessibility equals searchability, and thanks to Ms. Bateman for pointing that out.
Anyway, nice article, this, but I’d like to know why the NYT waited two months after the decision in the Target case to make it. And I’d also like to know why the NYT doesn’t discuss the accessibility of its own website. I ran the article through the WAVE accessibility validator and found a few errors — but also a few good features, like a skip-navigation. I used to use the NYT front page as an example of what not to do in terms of skip-navigation; now it seems that they’ve addressed this. So that’s good. But if they’ve worked on this, why not say so?